WHEN John Simpson told his doctors he was going on a 48-hour round trip to Canada this month, they looked at each other and rolled their eyes. The broadcaster and world affairs editor of the BBC had only just recovered from a serious health scare which almost killed him and yet here he was heading off on another trip abroad. His doctors didn’t try to stop him, he says, because they knew they wouldn’t be able to. Working as a foreign correspondent is, in his words, satisfyingly dangerous and often emotionally and physically damaging, but getting out there into the world and working is also pretty much the only way he knows how to cope.

The health scare could not have been more frightening. The 72-year-old journalist had just suffered a bout of food poisoning, he had played a game of cricket on a hot September day, and he had an allergic reaction to tablets he was taking. Together, it was a poisonous mix. “Apparently under certain circumstances, it can really do for you and it gets toxic,” he says on the phone from his home in Oxford. “But I’m fine. I told my doctors I was going to give a lecture in Ottowa and what are they going to do – a citizen’s arrest? I’m tired from the journey but I’ve got over that problem. I’ve a very tough, old physical structure. Once they’d saved my life, I was fine.”

And Simpson is used to doing this: treating work as a kind of salve for problems that are in themselves caused by work. He has had flashbacks and bad memories over the years, and some disturbed nights, but he has found, without sounding callous, that (mostly) the faces of the dead and the dying have not intruded on his sleep.

He gives an example in his new book, We Chose to Speak of War and Strife - the botched execution of three men in Kabul in 1996. He remembers thinking that he would never get the hangings out of his mind it was so brutal and horrible, but then he wrote a long piece about it for a newspaper and the nightmares never came. “I did have a slightly disturbed night that night but I’ve never dreamt about it or had any bad knock-on effects,” he says. “I do still think about it sometimes but I think that’s a way to sort these things out. It’s a little bit like an ambulance crew – you want them to be sympathetic but you don’t want them standing around saying ‘Oh gosh that must hurt’ or ‘I’m so sorry’ - you just want them to do the job, get you to hospital quickly. And the same thing with a journalist – I don’t think you want ‘Oh god how awful, I feel terrible’ or ‘I this, I that’. You just want to know what’s happened and then move on.”

There are other stories like this in We Chose to Speak of War and Strife, but they do not all belong to Simpson because the book, although it includes elements of memoir, is mostly a celebration of – and in some ways a eulogy for – foreign correspondents. All the famous correspondents are in there, such as Kate Adie and Henry Morton Stanley, who found David Livingstone in Africa, but there are many less well-known examples too which demonstrate the muscle and will required to work as a foreign correspondent, particularly in the early days.

One of the most vivid is William Howard Russell, who watched the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 and wrote about it for The Times. He talked to the wounded and survivors afterwards then sat writing on his knees by the light of a candle stuck in a wine bottle until, he wrote, it disappeared like a stage demon through a trap door. Then there’s the great Scottish foreign correspondent Archibald Forbes who was at the battle of Ulundi in 1879 during the Zulu War. After the British victory, he rode 120 miles to a telegraph office – a journey that at any instant might have brought the enemy down on him. But he did it, and wrote his story for the Daily News and became legendary in the process. Mark Twain called him the greatest war correspondent ever.

In many ways, Simpson’s book shows that the job of the foreign correspondent hasn’t changed all that much since the days of Russell and Forbes. “I’m not suggesting it’s all exactly the same,” he says, “but the basic rules of the job have remained unchanged since the 17th century and I suspect if you sat somebody down from that period and said to them ‘this is 400 years later and this is how we are doing it now’ I suspect they would be able to pick it up straight away. What made William Howard Russell such a great correspondent was simply that he sat down and talked to people and if he were in journalism today, that’s exactly what he’d do and he would be a really first class journalist.”

Simpson pays a long and detailed tribute to Russell in the book, but you can also feel him pining for the free spirit that correspondents of that type represented: they worked too much, drank too much and sometimes got into trouble. “It’s my background,” he says. “I don’t mean that I drank too much - although I have from time to time - I just mean that kind of tradition of the free-wheeling character, the sort of highly informed character, the man or woman who’s been everywhere. I’m not saying that’s me, but that has happened a great deal in the past and I think we’re losing it and we will soon have lost it.”

The book lays out exactly how that process is happening, although you only have to look at virtually any daily newspaper to see it for yourself. Simpson says one of the measures of the quality of a newspaper or broadcaster is its attitude to news from around the world – domestic news will always be the mainstay, he says, but there also needs to be good foreign coverage and yet it is one of the areas being increasingly squeezed. In fact, Simpson says his book is in many ways a celebration of a trade which he fears is on its way out.

“Things are going downhill very fast with newspapers like the Daily Telegraph,” he says. “Nevertheless, even the Telegraph has foreign coverage, it doesn’t have any foreign correspondents very much but it does have foreign coverage, it hasn’t got rid of that. And when you look at The Times, The Guardian or The Independent, you can see really good quality and the same is true in Scottish journalism and some parts of regional newspapers – it’s really important. It’s a touchstone of a quality of a newspaper that it’s interested in the world and not just in its own country. It’s so easy not to bother. It’s so easy to slip downmarket and not to care.”

The problem, says Simpson, is that market forces have started to erode the realm of the foreign correspondent because it’s a relatively expensive business – and television is not immune. “We’ve had huge cuts,” he says. “The limitations are now huge and the same applies to Newsnight and a lot of the first class outlets that we used to have. I’m a great supporter and admirer of Channel 4 News but when I watch it you can see how the cutbacks there are affecting it – it’s just that they happen to have such good quality people, they can kind of hide it and cover it over.”

Simpson suggests an interesting solution in the book - a licence fee that would cover both the BBC and newspapers – and he’s keen to avoid the idea that it’s all doom and gloom and was so much better in the old days. He does think journalists are over-managed and over-qualified and he does miss the old days, but he absolutely does not want to be gloomy in his book or in real life. “I’ve always rather done what I can to prevent myself from saying the past is better than the present,” he says, “but there are things from the past that I’m sorry to be losing and we have to work out ways in which we can keep the level high. If we can do that, then we haven’t lost everything.”

We Chose to Speak of War and Strife is published by Bloomsbury, priced £25.